What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
ADAM GOPNIKThere are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
ADAM GOPNIK